Under Fishbone Clouds (26 page)

‘You know that’s not what I meant. I’m just worried. After last time, I –’

‘I know, I know. I meant that these are signs that give us hope. Movement, that’s a good sign. A beating heart, a curious body. We should take comfort in these. He’ll be fine.’

‘Why are we both so sure it will be a boy?’ Yuying said, a smile forming in the dark.

‘Because it must be a boy.’

‘And when he is born? What will we do then?’ She was angling, hoping to hear Jinyi tell her that they could go home.

‘Then we’ll look after him. We won’t start walking somewhere else again, I promise. We’ve got a warm bed here, a safe house, and enough food.’

‘As long as he likes sweet potatoes,’ she muttered.

That was all they seemed to eat. The fields surrounding the house were planted and ploughed only for that tuberous root that could be pulled up snug in a single tug, the size of a clenched fist. They ate boiled sweet potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes mixed with salt, fried sweet potatoes with onion if any could be traded, and, for
celebrations
and festivals, caramelised sweet potatoes, the orange lumps glowing with strands of hot dark sugar. The flour they milled was also ground down from sweet potatoes, mixed with the off-white of wheat only on the rare occasions when trade went well. A few of those clay-red sacks of fleshy mulch were stacked beside the bed, the tubers shaved off as the vegetables were stored for winter. Just thinking of sweet potatoes made Yuying want to be sick.

‘There’s nothing wrong with sweet potatoes. My family have been farming them for centuries. There was once a passing warlord who decided to stop fighting and settle here because he swore they were the best sweet potatoes he had tasted in all his expeditions. Well, that’s what Uncle Hou says anyway,’ Jinyi said.

‘I know. That’s the only story he ever tells.’

‘Come on, it’s not that bad. This is where my ancestors live. They’re still out there; we just can’t see them. When you hear the wind chimes, or calls from birds you don’t quite recognise, or distant drums, that’s them. That’s what I used to think about my parents, to stop myself from going crazy here when I was young.’ Yuying imagined their children growing up there, and felt
suffocated
. Their days would be filled the same way as hers, with mud and ache and hunger. The house sat on the side of a valley, linked up with a few others higher up to form a spindly, set-apart village. There was a market day at the closest small town once a month, and a small abandoned schoolhouse on the other side of the hill. Each of the families on the hillside lived like spiders in the centre of a tatty web of prayers, curses, hopes and the ever-present dead ancestors who watched over their shoulders, their faint breath almost noticeable on the downy hairs of their necks.

Yuying noticed that Jinyi’s leg was twitching. He was half asleep, yet she did not want to give up yet.

‘I heard some of the traders talking the other day. They said that the civil war is nearly over.’

‘Hmm.’

‘It could be finished by next year.’

‘That’s good news. Who’s winning?’ Jinyi mumbled.

‘You mean you don’t know?’

‘Of course I do. I’m just joking. Let’s get some sleep.’ Jinyi yanked the hairy blanket tighter about his ears; moonlight peeked in through the tears in the paper across the square window.

‘It’ll be good news for my family. The city will be safe again.’ As soon as she said this she was unsure of what she meant. As safe as when the Japanese were there, guarding anything that fell within the sphere of their interests and herding everything else into shadow? Or as safe as before the invasion, a time known to her only through the foggy nostalgia of her mother’s occasional reminiscences?

‘That’s good,’ Jinyi said.

‘Though they might need help rebuilding the house and getting all the restaurants running again.’

‘It won’t be easy, but they’ll manage.’

‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’ she asked, turning and pressing her head up onto his turned shoulder.

‘Yes. Goodnight.’

She let him sleep, and surrendered herself to the small aches and jabs of the baby pushing against her sides, tiny hiccups juddering across her abdomen.

What is it that drives people so far from themselves? Is it to see how much they can give up while remaining the same? Or to witness what is left when everything is stripped away? And why do they do this? For love? A few years ago, Yuying would not have hesitated to say, ‘Yes, for love’, but now she was not so sure. This thought made her blush with guilt as she lay beside her snoring husband. She
wondered
whether her mother too had had to make and unmake herself. And this was simply another version of the question she asked herself every day: What will happen to me if I never return?

Yuying lay awake, rubbing her fingers into her bulge, trying to stir the baby into kicking, into sharing her sleeplessness. What will
happen to me if I never return? Jinyi snuffled and snored beside her. Might it be that we find ourselves only in how we are perceived, she wondered, and if this changes, then do we change too? She did not like this thought, so she turned instead to imagining her
husband
suddenly having a change of heart, and she smiled to herself as she thought of Jinyi taking her hands and announcing that they must return home.

Pain suddenly arched through her, as though she was a spark plug or an old tractor engine being started, and she roared loud enough to wake not just her husband but the whole house. It gripped and squeezed her, pulsing and tensing and piercing her muscles. Her husband sat straight up, roughly rubbing his eyes while his knees pushed off the blanket, and she bucked into the spasms of pain, and in that second she knew.

And again it came, the pain starting at the base of her spine and suddenly filling her; a clenching, tongue-biting lurch of pain mangling her inside out.

‘Get help,’ she whimpered at Jinyi, who was already up and pulling on his trousers.

‘Are you all right? What’s the ma–’

‘Get help,’ Yuying cried. She opened her mouth, and closed it again, the pain replaced with an ooziness, the sloppy flop of her stomach turning over. She pressed her fingers to the tops of her thighs and brought them up, sticky and smelling of rusted copper and the acrid tang of old soup stock. And though it would be hours before the room would have even a scrap of light, she knew that they were covered in blood.

In the next few hours the local midwife arrived, her hare-lip visibly twitching and her short rings of hair stuck to her oversized brow, and Yuying began the bitter push of delivering the stillborn baby, tinged blue and bloody. There was no comfort in knowing that they had been right, that it was a boy. The little twisted mess of clammy skin and wrinkles was passed quickly from the room, hidden from Yuying’s sight as she lay back, stoic and sweaty and silent on her elbows, speaking to no one, and no one daring to speak to her. She stared steadily at a point on the ceiling while her lips knotted into a tiny oval, a half-formed expression that she could not bring herself
to utter. If I speak it, she thought, it will become real. People moved in slow-motion around her, leaving her to the depths of blood and grief; the haggard midwife had other women to see, aunt and uncle were already out at the work that needed to be done no matter what. Eventually only her husband was left, nervously watching her chest slowly rise and fall.

As the sun came up, she asked to see her son. Jinyi moved to the child tentatively, almost afraid to touch it. It was clammy and small and tied in a bed sheet on the kitchen table, waiting to be taken by the men to be buried at the end of the field. It was only to the child that she would speak, worn-out whispers given to his peeled red stub of an ear. She moved her mouth close to his wrinkled head and closed eyelids as though her warm breath might suddenly make him move, speaking to him so softly that her husband had to leave the room, unable to bear the muttered hum of her gentle words, her tone that was warmer and more delicate than anything he had heard from her before.

Once outside Jinyi tried to catch his breath, stunned by the suddenness of this second ending; six and a half hours since he woke and he could only remember a few moments, ones he would try his best to put from his mind. He felt as though his heart had been crushed, mangled; and yet he suddenly wanted to relive it all, both of the babies’ brief half-lives, to see all the moments he had missed, to treasure every single second, even if that meant reliving all of this again. A scream curdled in his throat and tears scratched at the corners of his vision; he picked up the trowel and descended through the rows, because what else could he do?

Somewhere along a mountain pass, or in some private forest, Jinyi and Yuying must have caught the attention of some hungry demon, whispered Auntie Hou to herself. Snake-headed, all black teeth and charred tongue, he must have crept behind them all the way to the Hou’s house. Already he had claimed two of their children. Had they been girls, it might have been all right, but these were males, the blood of a family, its strength and its name. With every rustle of wind-gathered leaves, or the creak of the warped timber in the walls, Auntie Hou grew more and more convinced that the demon that had taken both the children was still out there, waiting. When
not working, she collected dried grass to burn in place of incense before the grubby altar that squatted behind the kitchen table. She tried to remember all her sins and urged the grieving husband and wife to do the same. You are cursed, she assured them.

Jinyi was the first to begin believing Auntie’s words, and drew chalk lines over their door to stop the demon returning. The
claw-filled
nightmares that left him matted with sweat were at least
preferable
to torturing himself over whether it was somehow his fault. It was almost harvest, the sticky warmth slowly being blown south, and Jinyi spent all his spare time praying to the handful of deities whose names he could remember, asking that the next baby would be healthy and strong. Yuying spent the same weeks vowing to herself that she would never let her husband close to her body again.

‘There is a doctor – don’t worry, not one of those new-fangled ones fiddling about with Western medicine! Oh no, I mean a
real
doctor – who may be able to make sure the demon never finds you,’ Auntie Hou told Jinyi.

She had heard of him from a neighbouring family whose sick child had been brought back to life by the doctor decades ago. Jinyi consented without asking Yuying, suspecting she might be uncooperative. She does not have to know, he thought. However, despite their best efforts, sending messages with everyone passing by and even sounding out the crowds at the market, the famous doctor could not be found. He had not been seen, apparently, since the civil war began.

Yuying was soon up and wandering through the rows again; yet she would often stop and spend hours studying the points where the rayed corners of the fields dipped into the haze and smudge of the horizon, her mind elsewhere. She felt closer to ninety than nearly nineteen, her body a catalogue of aches, her mind awash with what could have been. She followed the others in when the sun crept down unexpectedly about her, and sat with them in the tiny kitchen jammed between the two bedrooms, chewing her food halfheartedly.